If you’re a business owner, you know by now that social media is no longer an option but a necessity. And that’s especially true for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) markets. With the help of social media, you can now grow your online and offline businesses without spending too much on media buying or expensive pay-per-click (PPC) ads.

Obviously, the level of your social networking will determine how effective your social media marketing and content marketing can be. Some, who manage the social media campaigns properly, have shared testimonials of how they doubled traffic, or even more.

In this article, you’ll learn 5 tips to boost traffic with social media marketing. After all, this is what inbound marketing is about—merging social, search, email and news to produce quality results.

Offer helpful advice

Offering helpful advice can help a marketer achieve tremendous results.

When you offer good advice in terms of quality content and value, people will fall in love with and share your content via social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook. Don’t plead with your target audience to trust you, just earn it with your helpful advice.

Stay abreast of hot trends

A company that doesn’t keep in tune with happenings around their industry/niche is trading creativity for something else. Current news reveals a lot about the geographic environment, the business and what you stand to gain.

Each time you tweet about hot trends, your followers would be inclined to retweet and promote it. Every effort to get your message across to people in a timely manner will affect the ranking for your website, no matter how little.

Bad news can also get you many social fans and sharing, but it’s just that. The conversion rate will be low and discouraging.

Tip: To get news about what matters to you, subscribe to Google Alerts and read press release sites and get the alerts as they happen.

Capture your audience

People who follow you on Twitter are your audience already. They can spread the word for you.

However, those people landing on your site from your social media efforts are strangers to you. A stranger won’t go the extra mile to promote your business.

The best way to capture your audience is through opt-in subscriptions on your site.

Not all conversions happen at the first visit on your site, and if you don’t get your audience’s emails, you’re missing the target. In order words, organic traffic is a waste if you can’t convince them to join your email list. No matter what others will say, email is social media too, so don’t ignore it!

Be consistent

Almost all of the steps mentioned so far needs a fuel to run. Be consistent – that’s my best advice. It takes time to get result in any worthwhile project. Be it social media or search engine optimization.

The focus is on quality and epic content, coupled with a well-structured list building system.

Keep sending people to your landing pages and convert them to subscribers first, then refer them to your social media accounts. Over time, the efforts you put into collecting leads will pay off handsomely.

Build sociable links

How do people share articles and websites? The best way to garner plenty of links to your website is to make it sociable. In other words, make your content easy to share.

Make sure your social media buttons are well-placed. What a group of people can achieve is often faster and easier than what a single person aims for. Create articles with tips which are easy to use right away. Make it practicable, entertaining and unique. Creating an ‘ultimate guide’ is a great content marketing strategy that works.

Rather than struggling continuously to build links to your website pages, you can encourage other people to do it for on your behalf. Solve their problems, create content that’s easy to share, make people laugh, add humor or make them worry about a concern or any other emotion that will trigger a social share.

Takeaway

Social media marketing done right takes time and patience. However, getting others to share your content in web 2.0 sites is one of the best tactics for increasing traffic and boosting sales. It is also very rewarding to see your content being shared publicly, getting published on worthy sites and the news and, yes, even scrapped by other sites.

What do you think? How do you handle you current social media efforts? Let me know in your comments.

See you at the top!

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Traian Neacsu is the Director of Search Marketing and co-founder of Pitstop Media Inc, a Canadian company that provides top rated SEO services to businesses across North America. He has more than 10 years experience in helping small and medium businesses generate and convert organic traffic from search engines. Most of his time is dedicated to growing the company and spending time with the family. Connect with Traian on Google+.